Fairly solid game, beautiful art, great sprite animations which also serve to choreograph when enemies are going to attack, great music/sound effects and their application. The combat and crafting system is fairly engaging and at least from the half a dozen tries I had it was challenging and didn't feel repetitive; which is always great.
I'd like to take a quick moment to praise MrJackieDees for their music and sounds, I think for audio, this game has been not just my favourite but I would say indisputably the best with two original and appropriately used music tracks which seemed to loop seamlessly. And the half a dozen-ish sound effects which provided great feedback throughout the game for various actions.
The main drawback seems to be how incredibly small scale the game is, I was even more taken aback when this was the biggest team in the jam.
When it comes to unique visuals, I counted the 1 (perhaps 2?) background image(s), the 1 character sprite, the cauldron, the 4 brewing ingredients (which are super cute btw!), the 14 (I think?) upgrades, and the inventory slot icon . These all look really amazing, which makes it that much more of a shame that there was only a handful that were on screen for more than a tiny percent of the game, it would have been really cool to see either different enemies, obstacles or projectiles to break up the game more visually.
For the cauldron screen, it would have been really nice to have a list of discovered recipes, I actually ended up making a list myself because the difference between how useful they were was pretty extreme (20hp heal vs 1hp, for example).
Hitting the ingredients with your own projectiles I'm honestly not really a fan of, 99% of the time it just splits up the oncoming ingredients which you would have otherwise caught and causes you to catch none of them; it conditions the player to limit their shooting to avoid firing more projectiles than required to kill the enemy. The crafting recipe that lets you juggle an extra time was novel and ended up being funny a few times but there doesn't seem to be a purpose to bouncing the ingredients, if bouncing them either increased their potency or they did damage to enemies or something similar I think this could have been an incredibly engaging system which would leave me praising the already solid gameplay loop even more.
I'm not sure if it's a bug or there was a shortage of time, but upon dying, the game just keeps playing, the health bar recognises you died, but there is no way to try again or even head back to the main menu. It would have been really nice to be able to jump right back into the action, even more so with how this game might have had the second longest loading time out of the entries.
It's not really a bug but when on controller, if you run out of enough ingredients to use, you have to move your selection across the inventory bar until you reach the "Next Fight" button, it wasn't an issue for me, to see, but the "Need more ingredients!" overlay obscures the bar so this might be hard to see for some people and would just be better off having their selection being moved and limited to the button when this happens.
One bug I did come across was that you can actually mash the selection button for a brewing ingredient and if will spawn multiple of itself above the cauldron, you can very easily get it to spawn 2 by double clicking and I was even able to spawn 3 sometimes, this happens both on keyboard and controller.
All in all this is one of my favourites for the jam, but I would have really loved to see how it turned out with more time put into it. I don't know if the team were for this jam only, but I'll be keeping an eye out for the members in future jams and looking forward to their work.